Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Spring Break 2009! You can tell from Andrew's face...we were all thrilled. Just kidding! Truly, we were all really excited to go skiing after a year off, and hey, who's not up for a 17 hour family fest in a crowded suburban through the whole length of Nebraska...and beyond!

Princess Ariel (a.k.a. Lily) was in good spirits for the camera!

Katie is standing next to the Casa Bonita sign in Denver...There was a little bit of shall I say...angst...about whether we should take the time to stop here at this memorable Mexican theme restaurant when we still had to get through the mountains that night, but when Andrew (who was voting NO not to go to the restaurant) said that he remembered it from several years back, it was deemed worthy of another stop so that Timmy could also be amazed by the cliff divers, cave tunnels and very mundane yet remarkably expensive mexican food.

Timmy noticed that although we all ordered different meals, they all looked the same!....

Here we are at the condo in Breckenridge getting ready to hit the slopes on the first day. The first day of skiing is always traumatic what with getting everybody situated with their gear....apparantly altitude can make children suddenly grow three sizes so that they can't fit in the boots they wore last week! Did you know?

For some reason, we missed getting pictures of Andrew boarding this year. He's a fantastic boarder...but here he is being cool and pretending he doesn't know us. He's only looking at us in this picture because we MADE him! Can you feel the cool?

Two Snowboarders ready to bomb the hills! And they did go fast!

We had the kids' pictures taken mid mountain...turned out pretty well, although a little too much snowboard in the pose...and Timmy had one eye closed in every picture!

Me, Timmy, Zach and Tim's dad Lindy on the chairlift...I hate it when people take pictures on the chairlift....I believe that everyone should be hanging on to the handlebars and not moving unnecessarily. So I always try to make sure my eyes are open so they don't prolong the photo shoot.

Timmy catching a little air at the terrain park.

Zachary catching a lot of air at the terrain park. Like I said, Andrew does it just as well, but we didn't have the camera with us when he was doing it.

Good Tip: Always dress kamakaze boys in orange...helps you see them as they whizz and then crash in the trees! Timmy especially needs to be watched. I finally had to explain clearly to him that the ropes with the orange flags hanging on them meant that he should NOT ski under them. His reply: "They just put those there because of the creek down there, but it was no problem!"

"Should we have cocoa with whipped cream?...or cheesy fries with a side of brownie?" This is the real work of skiing.

Swedish.

The Princess Skiis! (I'm referring to Lily not myself.)

Waiting for a table at the pizza place the last night....don't let the sweet angelic smile fool you...he's either grabbing Timmy by the you know what or about to...

Yes! My genes are in there somewhere!....reading a book on the street...I love it!

Rare footage.

Such a ham!

Great Pizza with the Family...a fun last night in town!

Finally, our thanks to Tim's parents, Lynn and Linda for a great week of skiing and hanging out!

I just think this is the sweetest picture.

Help me somebody...I write this lovely draft with the words wrapping around the pictures and it looks so nice, and then when I publish it to the post, my margins go haywire and I have to spend more time going back and trying to make it work than it took me to write it in the first place! Any advice?

Monday, March 23, 2009

We decided to do a "quick" detour on the way home through the Black Hills in South Dakota so that we could see Mount Rushmore. We'd camped there at the Silven Lake Campground several years ago with the Trelevens, and they'd treated us to a well guided Black Hills experience then, but Timmy didn't remember anything...no wonder since he was about 3!

The detour ended up taking SO MUCH longer than we'd planned...by the time we got to the Black Hills we'd been driving for 7 1/2 hours...

Note to self and others!: after being crammed into a car with absolutely zero extra space is NOT, I repeat NOT the time to stop at one of these "vistas"...I mean death wish dropoffs with NOTHING to stop some squirrly headed kids from plummeting down ravines and being spring breakfast for all the hungry bears whom I'm sure were being rudely awakened by all our whooping and hollering! Of course, it had been my somewhat unpopular idea to go on the Needles Highway for a bit before we went to Mount Rushmore anyway, so I had nobody to blame for the sudden death of my children but me. The instant their unlaced

tennis shoes hit the loose gravel next to the puny little one wire fence some well-intentioned insurance adjuster had put up, I knew I'd made a BIG mistake. Sure it was beautiful...stunning in fact...and I enjoyed exactly none of it! The kids took off in four directions, out on ledges, up cliffs...you name it. No force of nature or parental threat could stop them... take a look at these pics and you'll see what I mean...

But first,

here they are all alive and happy... this may have to be next year's Christmas Pic.

Behind this rock is a sheer dropoff!!!

Whoopee. Freaked me out. This was way past the fence, my friends...way past the fence!

And they had absolutely no business being here either! This is taken on a full zoom....the fist in the air signifies that I IGNORED MY MOM ALL THE WAY UP HERE AND THERE WAS NOTHING SHE COULD DO ABOUT IT!!!! "HI MOMMMM!"

Here's a picture of Zach the Rock Climber...actually, these pictures were taken to simulate Zach being the tough rock climer. Andrew is in reality laying on the ground

to take this and Zach is all of a foot or two off the ground. It is one

of our peculiar pastimes to take these sort of pictures...Again, no worries... it's the pictures I was too freaked out to take that were the problem...

Tim had to get in on it too! Notice the strained facial expression...facial expression is key to making it look really real...

Again, the hero woodsman rock climber risking life and limb....all the while Katie and Timmy had gone missing until they called from way up above.....somewhere....on some precipice....

After making everybody mad at me by forcing them to stop at the Needles, I then continued to make everybody mad at me by shooing their behinds BACK IN THE CAR before anyone was even close to ready to go...my heart couldn't take any more! Tim wanted to get the kids out of the car again at one of the tunnels, but I begged him not to...let's just get to Mount Rushmore...

MOUNT RUSHMORE

Just so you know I was actually on this trip...

They are so cute!

Icecream Cones the Size of Your Head: Butter Pecan

"Mountain Hair"

There were absolutely no Tims, Zachs or Andrews on the monument building crew, but there was a Gustav L.....obviously a relative!

Like we hadn't had enough!....here we go again!

This was pretty fun...and soft.

Pretty safe here, huh?

THINK AGAIN!!!! See the dots that are my children...right there in the middle?!!Same picture!I was in the car.

After another couple of hours of driving, we pulled into some old cowboy town in the middle of nowhere South Dakota....the pool was cool...

Everything was cowboy themed, including our bedspreads....here's part of one...

Here's a tired little cowpoke at the chuckwagon breakfast. Taxidermy is alive and well in South Dakota, judging from the thirty or more stuffed animals of all sorts whom we joined for a bite in the lobby. It was a bit creepy, and kinda hard to eat with all those eyes looking at you...but then we went outside...

Ok, I have a little backlogblogging to do before I upload our Breckinridge Vacation, which was great, by the way.

First, in order for the pictures at the end of this to have meaning, I need to give you a "little" background story....

It all began with our fourth child, Timmy. Timmy was barely through the birth canal when he looked us in the eye and asked for a dog. Pretty much! You know there are just some people out there who are "dog people," and although neither my husband Tim nor I are anywhere remotely near that category, through some genetic mutation, our little Timmy clearly is. He may have inherited it from Grandpa Dave, now that I think about it, but that's another entry...that's another whole blog site in fact. But the fact is, that he has loved dogs, any dog, since he was born.

One winter when Timmy was four or five and still held the status of "baby of the family", it just so happened that a pregnant stray showed up at my parents' door in Southern Illinois. This is not unusual; in fact this is the most common way that my folks acquire dogs! Don't spread this around, but no dog is ever turned away...so it came to be that "Lucy" and her several offspring born later in the spring were fully embedded in the Curry household when we came to visit that summer. There were at least five puppies, all at the adorable "furball" stage and ready to find families...desperate to find families.... It was INEVITABLE! It was UNAVOIDABLE!...it would have been much BETTER if Tim had been along to sanction the decision! But for some reason he was not, thus I am forever branded with the full responsibility for the fact that we arrived back in Minnesota with one extremely adorable, fuzzy furred mutt with absolutely no training but a lot of love to give....and poop....lots and lots of poop...and pee that was pure grass killing acid...and toenails like razors, and fur that billowed in the wind and on my floor. His name was Fisher. (You are wondering where "Frodo" comes in...bear with me...)

Sadly, "we" were completely inept at training Fisher. I was too busy trying to train my kids! And I'd never had a house dog...which is a very different thing than a "run around wherever" country dog such as those I'd grown up with. After struggling for a year and a half, we decided that, to save our sanity, our marriage, (not to mention our floors and our grass), we would try to find an adoptive family. God knew we were at the end of our rope, because he provided a miracle almost right away in the form of a dear lady in my book club group who amazingly agreed to adopt Fisher as a companion for their 13 year old yellow lab named Fenway! Fenway and Fisher...perfect don't you think? I did! He went from being the frustration of the family to the adored pet who got walks every day. (The only person in OUR family with the inclination to walk Fisher was little Timmy; but after one attempt it became clear that Fisher flew Timmy like a kite and to let them go off would be to never see either one again!!...) So Fisher went to live with his new (and better, I'll admit it) family. It was the completely right and appropriate and as I mentioned before marriage saving thing to do...except for one thing which we didn't realize until about two years later...it broke Timmy's heart.

And oh he'll tell you how it broke his heart. He especially likes to do so on holidays and at dinner parties! Believe me, he can make a grown man cry with his story. He is now nine and is getting quite professional at it. In fact, this past winter he had his dad feeling so incredibly guilty that Tim was ready to do the ridiculous, the impossible, the please somebody just knock him unconscious before it's too late...to actually get another puppy for Timmy for Christmas! Gasp! I assure you, I wasn't going to let it happen!!! I threw myself across the proverbial train tracks on this one. It wasn't a hard case to argue, believe me. But Tim was in such throes of mesmerizing guilt that I had to resort to saying "dog poop...dog poop....dog poop..." over and over until the crazy light left his eyes and he came back, back to the universe we live in!

I had to compromise, my friends...I had to. There was no other choice once he'd brainwashed his Dad but to tell Timmy that when the older three kids leave for college, we will give it another try...with a small dog...who will be 100% trained before we get him and be completely, unretractably Timmy's responsibility. The words were scarcely out of my mouth before Timmy was running to get witnesses before whom I had to repeat the whole suggestion which was quickly transformed into a blood oath before I knew what was happening! I'm in deep! He reminds us every 10 days or so, and I suspect he's keeping a day count up in his room somewhere since he always has a fairly accurate time count as to when Andrew leaves for college. (Notice the subtle switch to when Andrew leaves not when all three older kids leave...he's sly that Timmy...but I'm onto him.)

All this leads to Frodo. Frodo is my friend Lisa's shorthaired dachtsund (spelling?).

Here he is...isn't he cute?

Sadly her grandmother passed away recently, and while we were so sorry for her loss, we were thrilled to dogsit Frodo while they were away at the funeral. And much to my delight, Timmy was ALL OVER IT! Here was a dog he could take for walks! He stood out in the yard for long stretches of time waiting for little Frodo to do his thing! (He tried playing football with Frodo, but that didn't work out so well...) But for the whole twenty four hours we had him, Frodo was Timmy's constant companion...or vice versa...they were so sweet together, and I didn't have to do anything...it was wonderful!

I mean just look at his face...Timmy's I mean...(of course Lily can't stand to be left out.)

The licking was nonstop...eeek...but he truly loves it.

True Love...and after only a day...

Now in case any of you dog lovers out there are making plans to throw a brick through my window or anything, let me just say that Timmy sees Fisher on occasion and in fact just recently got a good all over bodywash from Fisher who is always ecstatic to see any of us, even Tim. (Go figure.) And he has been emotionally healed somewhat by the promise of a dog of his own in a few short years, not to mention the guilt leverage he now expertly holds, especially over his dad. And, although I hope it is under happier circumstances, I'm sure Lisa will loan us Frodo in the future and Timmy can get his dog fix that way. See? It all works out, Praise Be to God. The End.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Hello everybody! We've been having a ball this week skiing, hot tubbing and watching basketball of course! Numbskull that I am, I left my camera battery charging in the charger in the wall at home, so we had to borrow Todd and Kirstin's camera (THANK YOU TO THEM! They always manage to bail us out...), but I don't have a way to upload pics to the computer. All that to say that I can't post pictures of me cutting up the slopes (read sarcasm here) until probably Monday because let us face it, I am going to have the world record laundry pile to do when we get back on Sunday afternoon. But back to me cutting up the slopes, I've skied FOUR days, which is another record, and I am so excited that Tim said my pants looked baggy tonight!!!!!!...that's worth another set of exclamation points I think!!!!!!!!...and another!!!!!!!, but I'm sure that two days of sitting in the car with our next fast food meal being my most interesting contemplation will undo any toning or tightening that might have taken place. OK, enough about that.

We completed our picks Thursday morning, and I picked UCONN to go all the way...that's the University of Connecticut by the way...I just follow Zach's advice because he's been researching this for weeks. Why reinvent the wheel? And who cares anyway? Well, a lot of adolescent and post adolescent males, it appears...game after game after game. Does anybody get this? Has anything this meaningless ever meant this much to SO MANY people? Am I the only one who even wonders this? Please tell me I'm not alone.

Alright, this is getting boring with no pictures, so I'll quit. We are leaving at 6 in the morning, going to do a Mount Rushmore driveby Lindquist style, and then either drive it all the way home or go as far as we can...I've had two dreams now about a dead cat, so I'm a little anxious to get home and check on Angel Sweetiepie Lindquist (Katie named him four years ago....the girls we got him from told us he was a girl...) Anyway, that's the plan, and on Monday I'll post some pictures and that will be much more interesting, I'm sure.

One Lily quote to finish with:On her third day of skiing: "Dad, you can quit following me now!"

Welcome!

Many years ago, my future father-in-law would always say to me, "Are you happy on the way?" I found the question odd. (Sometimes I WAS, and sometimes I WASN'T! And just what "way" was he referring to?!) Over the years, though, I've begun to understand the question and the journey it speaks of. This site is a reflection of my life, my faith, what I've learned on my own and what others have taught me...oh and there will be food. There's always food! Come and laugh with me. Welcome.

About Me

I'm 42 (Ugh. Did I just start out with my age? I hate updating this ev-er-y year) and am a follower of Jesus Christ. I am married to a great guy named Tim who practices intellectual property law and am mother to five children ages 18, 17, 15, 12 and 6! I enjoy Bible Study, reading and trying to keep our busy household together. Sort of . I mean sort of together...not that I sort of enjoy it... I like to cook and garden too, although time is limited. Blogging is my outlet, my way of processing what's going on in my life and my way of taking a second grateful look at the blessings God has graciously bestowed!